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angie-anglela rules!!!!
suzi9mm too!!!!!!

Gnash set a saber at her throat, the blade rocking against her larynx like a saw as she lay just beneath sleep. She willed to raise a single finger against her phantasmal oppressor, and with it she leveraged her body, shifting as he released her into full morning. It was Saturday--otherwise Grant would have been up and peeling off his running clothes from his morning jog, and showering, instead of sleeping with his face in the pillow, one stocky hairy leg crooked over her knee. Jean tried to shake off the specter as she stretched her sluggish muscles and slipped the cover from her face, squinting to find her place by the flashing red numbers on the clock, inside a round of bedroom furniture and under a speckled ceiling. She found herself back in daylight, the flip side of that hole she slipped down every night, in the pit of Gnash’s violent pursuit. The nightmare still held her down, smothering her breath and wringing her feelings out. For the rest of the day he would buzz alongside her daytime thoughts, having gamboled over the fences of her dreams. Salt pasted her blonde lashes together as the tears swept the sleep from her eyes and a knot of sobs jammed up at her breastbone. The honey yellow light that gently pushed in through the drapes was a feigned benediction; it would be a pitiless scorching day. She flicked off the teardrops and walked naked into the bathroom, holding in her sub-center pudge, below the remnant of broken rope, above the crux of her legs; she locked the door and turned on the shower. Sitting on the toilet seat, she spilled out the end of her nightmare, covering her face with her hands and letting out her grieved voice under the drumming of the glittering spray, loud as she was only when Carrie stayed overnight at her best friend’s house and she and Grant made love in fortissimo. Her weeping was brief and her tears scant. In the mirror she saw her face was not reddened by the eruption, a brief torrent mopped up by sudden sunlight, but dark rings swung about her sunken eyes and creases ran down her cheeks. She slung her grief back over her shoulder and returned to the bedroom, her eyes dry and her mouth firm. As she flipped up the window shade, the shadows fell out of the room. She sat back in bed and watched Grant’s eyes, lidded against daylight and distress, and she cupped a hand over his breast to feel it rise with his heartbeat. He slept with his lips parted and nodded his head a little, acknowledging her even while clinging to a thread of a dream.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, rousing. “You’re up early.” He yawned.

“Just a nightmare.”

“They’re not real.” Grant turned over and rested his reddish grizzled head on one broad forearm and dozed again. She pulled the coral quilted bedspread up to her neck. Nightmares she had no trouble remembering; it was the benign dreams that fled, embarrassed, even if she sank under the covers again to coax them back. The good ones she did remember were airy: there were houses without roofs, rooms which were gardens, and in them she was always moving--half-walking, half-gliding along treeless roads.

“I’ll start a pot of coffee. Carrie’s game, remember?” she said, and she put on her mint seersucker robe.

Scratch, a cat the color of eggs fried over hard, rubbed his back against the door frame waiting to be let out. He had skinny legs and a broad middle, his gait was a rabbit’s hop, and his face was mashed flat. A stray, when he came to the back door a few years ago, Grant gave him a bowl of milk. It wobbled and threw up and looked at them in helpless regret. Grant nursed him that night and brought him to the vet for shots and medicine. Scratch’s strong point was mouse-catching: once or twice a week he dropped one next to her side of the bed—a pinkish corpse with translucent curved claws--so that she always glanced down before putting on her woolly white slippers. She let him out and picked up the paper from the front porch of their condo in the flesh-colored complex of squat multifamily buildings with the blue and yellow tubular play structure in the center.

Grant never had nightmares; he slept hard, woke easily and moved day by ordinary day between the office where he ordered supplies for the base and his garage where he fashioned wood. From behind his goggles he ran the jigsaw or the sander, and before bed he sat in a straight-backed chair with a carving knife and a block of wood while she read in the recliner. He constructed big blocks of bunk beds with broad sturdy screws and set shelving around the toilet, on the stairway landings, or stepping up the walls. He made the knotted cedar chest which crouched at the foot of their bed stuffed with photos and their old love letters from his deployments. He cut solid puzzles of alphabets and states and carved cars and trucks with wheels that never jammed. The latest was a bedroom set for Carrie, which he painted white and ringed with daisies. The flowers danced under the curved border of her headboard and rippled along the bottom of her dresser, as if the pieces had been left in a windy yellow meadow. Each winter he would add a gentle chiseled figure to the crèche he gave her their first Christmas—a shepherd in flowing gown with a slender crook, a kneeling king with a jeweled crown, or a muscled cow resting with one eye half open. Jean would hold the first figure drawn out of redwood which fit warmly in the palm of her hand, the limbs plump and curved inward, the child sleeping cupped in the center of a strange and violent world.

The nightmares started a few months ago. She knew it was connected to that thoughtless time, an incongruous period; it was a rash, fixed scene that could never be quite wiped out, like a tumor clinging to the spine of her lifespan. If not for that, she would have been like any of the women in her neighborhood--mothers who managed family, finances and fidelity and drove bullet-shaped vans to work and school and soccer. She volunteered in the library and organized the blood drive. She was roommother and girl scout leader and read every word of the sheaf of Carrie’s school papers, as if she herself would be graded and tested on their content.

It happened a full year before Carrie was born—fifteen months before, in case anyone wanted to count. And had it not happened, Carrie would never have been. Grant had begged for another after Margaret, but Jean wasn’t having any more. Margaret was delivered by forceps after six hours of pushing; she had colic, horrendous twos, and run-ins with teachers in preschool. But after that incident, Jean gave in and gave Carrie to Grant as a secret peace offering. This left her teetering over a repulsive contradiction: if she could rip that episode out of the weave of her life, it would send Carrie careening back to some unreachable region of never been.

Something must have started it all recently, perhaps just meddling hormones, those last-ditch youth-loving throbs of a winding-down body that take a just recently balanced life and send shock waves through it from heart to stomach and throw shadows up against the walls of the psyche. But Gnash was not just a nightmare: he had been animated at the nether-line binding her body and its surging blood to her sleepless soul. He was an incubus, the medieval demon who ravished women by night, smothering them and leaving them with deformed progeny. Gnash stole the form of Grant and seized a moment of his quick anger to generate a furious spirit. Her husband might have yelled at her a half dozen times in their twenty-four years of marriage, but it was Gnash who grabbed his voice and lashed it over her night after night. A momentary rage that would always be subsumed into Grant’s good nature—even had he discovered that thoughtless event--had been stolen and fixed into a personal persecutor. But the worst was that contempt she had some few times seen in Grant’s eyes which now burned from the sockets of the fuming ghost who hated her with an unending scorn. This incarnate fury endured outside the kindly gush of days that had kneaded Grant’s temper into easy routine and pounded down his stubbornness. She named her incubus Gnash, and he afflicted her while his double slept beside her without malice.

Two weeks ago Gnash pushed her into traffic—or Carpe did, as she jogged with him. Carpe was Grant’s shepherd collie mix, dead now for eight years. She had never walked the dog in her day life, because he pulled her around on the leash, spinning her and wrapping the leather around her ankles. But this nocturnal Cerberus took her into the path of the car, and she was whirled against the windshield before she woke up looking for glass shards around her bed. Two days ago the grinning demon with Grant’s face and thick red-haired arms led her by a rope through cobblestone alleys and up a spiral staircase into a tower with chained women and an iron maiden laid open with gleaming spikes offering a bloody embrace.

“Are you taking Carrie to soccer today, or am I?” Jean asked as she handed him a cup of coffee.

“Both of us. We’ll bring lounge chairs and thermoses. Make it a date.”

“Cheap-o. Only if you take us to breakfast afterward.”

“You’re on.”

Bill had been a single marine who lived in a house kitty-corner from theirs, with the tangled playground tubes between them. Like Grant, he was medium-height and stocky; people who didn’t know them would confuse them. Bill bounced as he walked in a half-run. He was the neighborhood activist, ringing doorbells to bring petitions and notices of meetings and writing weekly letters complaining to the housing office about the trash cans left out on the curb and the burned-out street lamps. He organized the block parties and stationed himself at the grill, flipping the hamburgers and hot dogs onto the neighbors’ paper plates with the buns splayed open, kids first. Sometimes his boys came over on the weekend, a blonde and a redhead; the two stayed to themselves, riding their bikes in circles around the blue and yellow playground.

At that time Bill was on terminal leave and would be moving within the month; she heard he had bought his own bar. She was then a cashier at the commissary working from Wednesday to Sunday. When she woke late that Monday, it was to the sound of Bill mowing the playground patch, and she was a month away from thirty. She was not particularly unhappy that she remembered, but she was curious and could imagine herself as different women: one breaking horses at her own stable; another, an oncology nurse washing up bald children; or even a nature photographer in khakis in East Africa . A single question arose out of the others about herself: would she be noticed? She stepped onto the porch with her robe falling open and her breasts winking at him and crouched down for the paper as he looked over. He noticed and ran his mower into a whirl. Inside, she dropped her garnet robe to the kitchen floor and waited for him at the large bay window as he walked over with roses cut from his garden, the thorns pressing against his palms. Then she let him in--thoughtless.

Affairs, she thought, happened after an intense struggle against one’s unwanted feelings. And once the new pair succumbed, there would eventually be tremendous scenes with screaming spouses, weeping children, and gossiping neighbors. It was already scripted with characters; the sets were built and painted; cameras whirred from all angles with blinding lights. It could even come to murder if there was a gun in the house (there was) and if the wronged spouse came unprepared upon the errant couple. There might have been corpses left sprawled across the bed with blood spattered on the walls and pools of red gore soaked into the white carpet—a murder or two followed by a desperate suicide. Ugly, but definitely passionate. Nobody ever said it might be boring from start to finish and everything in between. Bill came over for four or five Mondays while Grant was working and the kids were at school, and that was it. Maybe it was only three if she didn’t count the time when the phone rang just before consummation.

“You don’t have to get it.”

“I told Grant I would be home this morning.”

“You could have gone to the store. Never mind, answer it.”

She forced her breath to an even gait. It was Margaret’s teacher Ms. Schultz who wanted to talk about a fight Margaret had provoked with another girl. She wondered where the child might have “picked up” these aggressive tendencies and what Jean was going to do about it. Jean’s face flushed to her ears as she hung up with a lame “are you sure that’s Margaret Johansen you’re talking about” and a wimpy “whatever you think best.” She sat on the edge of the bed and crossed her bare legs while Bill pulled his pants back on.

“Another time,” Bill said. He handed her a cigarette, and she smoked from then on, and always alone. Grant had always smoked, and she had always opposed it. Once Grant discovered her smoking, he left packs for her in the bathroom cupboard so that Margaret wouldn’t pick them up.

The following Monday Bill told her at the door that it would be the last time and asked politely whether knowing that she wanted to go ahead or not, and confusedly she agreed. He packed up his moving truck that weekend.

Bill was her daylight incubus, a taunting projection by Gnash further into her everyday life. She saw him popping out at the end of an aisle at the grocery store, but then it turned out to be a man with a different face. Or he was in the snaking payday line at the bank, and then he turned and left early. Once she thought he was standing next to her at the dry cleaner’s while she was trying to peer at him peripherally. Unsure, she fled in a panic, leaving her wallet on the counter. By the time she went back to retrieve it, he was gone again.

She ground the coffee beans and filled the receptacle with water. Her forehead was washed with sweat from the blaze of morning light in the east-facing bay window. When she put a cup of coffee on the nightstand next to Grant, he reached over and grabbed her at the waist, pulling her back onto the bed. He untied her robe, pushing it to her sides, and glided his palm from her throat to the blonde-gray down lining her folds. He reached his arms under her robe and around her back and held her in a loose clasp.

“What were you dreaming about?” he asked.

“You, of course.”

“Then it was a good dream. You were dreaming of things I will do to you now, right?”

“Sure, Grant.”

“What’s the problem, Posy?”

“Nothing. I’m happy.”

“I’ll make you happier.”

“I have to get Carrie up. We’re leaving in an hour.”

“There’s enough time.”



Grant and Jean sat in their lounge chairs with lidded mugs of black coffee held between their knees.

“Go, Carrie!” Grant said jumping up. She was rolling the ball down the field with quick, controlled kicks. Her opponents crowded her, but she moved deftly in, broke through, and punted it to the goal.

“Carrie, Carrie, Carrie.” Grant stood and clapped, while Jean stayed in her chair. She kept behind Grant since she saw Bill across the other side of the field cheering for a kid on the opposing team, maybe his child. But his kids should be grown by now, like Margaret. The sweat gathered at her hairline as she tried to force her brain to register real features and associate them either with harmless strangers or known threatening persons. She couldn’t decide.

“She got the goal,” Grant turned around and said.

“I saw.” Carrie waved to them as she ran down the field, her blonde straight hair flying behind her, and Grant jumped up and shouted again. Carrie’s team won, 6-2.

“I see a friend over on the other side,” Grant said.

“Don’t you want to congratulate Carrie?” Jean asked, jumping up.

“I’ll be right back.” Jean strained to see as Carrie walked up.

“Hi, sweetheart.”

“Mom, I got two goals.”

“I know. You did great.” Binoculars would have helped. One lady brought them to follow her daughter around the field through two tiny portholes. Grant was now standing in front of the man he was talking to, the man who looked like Bill--Bill in a blur.

“Do we get to go to breakfast?”

“Well, I guess so, since you won.” She meant to smile, but her mouth was paralyzed, like when Gnash was pushing her down and she was trying to stir herself awake. Grant returned.

“Carrie, you were stupendous. I had to console the parents on the other side. Grown men crying, honestly.”

“Oh, dad.”



The following Monday Bill was coming up their walk again with roses in his hand. She was in her seersucker robe with her coffee, standing over the newspaper spread out on her kitchen table and staring out the window. How could he have known she had taken the day off? Unless, inexplicably, Grant had told him something yesterday at the soccer field. Who was it he had talked to? She was going to ask him several times, but then her throat kept going numb.

She stood behind the front door, waiting for him to knock or ring and trying to decide whether she would open it or not. She would not be thoughtless but would tell him to go, firmly. No sound. She waited for the shuffle up the walk, footsteps on the porch, for the creaky swing of the screen door or the peal of the doorbell. She slumped down and lay curled with her back to the door. Gnash had pursued her the night before along stone steps; he had trapped her in a doorless stone turret so high she couldn’t see the wood roof. All she wanted was a few minutes of sleep without him mocking or shoving her. She closed her eyes and woke to a ringing sound. When she opened the door, no one was there. The phone rang insistently, and she picked it up.

“Hey, you,” Grant said.

“Hey, you.”

“I thought you were at work, but they said you called in sick. What’s the matter?”

“I didn’t sleep well.”

“Don’t they mind? It’s a couple of times this month already.”

“It’s just I get these nightmares and I can’t get back to sleep.”

“You know, we kind of need your income. Tuition.”

“I know. Tell me something.”

“What, Posy?”

“Never mind.”



Bill told her he would never be caught dead in a library. She didn’t remember much of what they talked about, but he did say that everything he wanted to learn about life he heard in the bar listening to the customers. She drove to the strip mall where the library was housed since the city lost the ballot initiative for a new building for four years straight. It was her favorite place now, knowing that there she didn’t have to look behind her. She shelved the books, sent out the fine notices and replaced the magazines. She looked up “incubus” in the encyclopedia. They sat on you at night and tried to suffocate you. They tormented you because you had broken some natural law—anything could set them off. And the thing they hated most was a pot boiling next to the fire. All she had at home was a little gas-rigged fireplace with a fake log--nothing to hang a pot on. She shut the book and drove home. On the way back she caught a glimpse of his gold VW, but it turned the corner to the left before she could get a good look at him. She took a detour right to get further away.



“I need to come home, Mom, now,” Margaret said that night on the phone. “ Gary is stalking me.”

“How can he be stalking you if he’s living with you?”

“I kicked him out, or he kicked himself out when he found out about Neil.”

“Who’s Neil? Did you call the police? And what about your classes?” She handed the phone to Grant.

“Talk to her. Now she wants to quit school.”

“Fine, stir this.” It was from a freezer bag—chicken, Chinese vegetables, rice and a seasoning package sprinkled over it at the end.

If Margaret had a boyfriend living with her, she would spend the afternoon with a different one. She was studying art history, but it might be psychology now. She tottered at the edge of life like a drunk walking a line for an officer, both before and since her stint in rehab the summer after graduation when she wrecked the car and cocaine was found riding along her bloodstream. Once she was picked up for shoplifting, but in the end they didn’t find anything on her. Jean assumed she was at least still smoking pot, but Grant never lost sleep whether she was or wasn’t.

No matter how many times they told you you should talk to your child about sex, Jean had no idea how parents did it. She would plan the little talk for an afternoon and invite her for a walk in the rose garden downtown. But every time she started to speak, her throat got tight, and all she could think about was Bill. Margaret let her off the hook—told her to relax, she already knew all about it. They saw the videos at school and came home with diagrammed flyers and condom samplers. Now she imagined Margaret running into Bill at one of the bars she frequented with her friends and her fake ID when she was at home. Margaret would notice him first, Bill would look at her, and neither would know she was the daughter of his former lover.

“Fine, but if you come home you’re getting a job and you’re paying rent,” Grant said. “We’ll be there on Friday.” The frying pan was starting to smoke. Grant took the spoon from Jean and turned down the heat.

“Is she doing drugs again?” she asked.

“All I know is what she already told you.”

“How do you know he won’t follow her here?”

“Eight hundred miles? If he does, I’ll beat him up. Can you take Friday off? We can get out Thursday night with a trailer. But don’t do it if you’re going to get in trouble there. Even without tuition, we could still use your job.”

“I’ll tell them it’s a family crisis. They’re pretty understanding.”

“OK, but then seriously Jean, you need to start getting some sleep. Get something for it.”



She slept now, and when she woke she found herself answering people in short flat sentences out of straight uncomplicated thoughts. She wondered where Gnash went while she was asleep, and she felt vaguely wrong to not care so much about Bill, or Margaret, or Grant--thoughts that once circled like a cyclone now pinged off her without sticking. She stopped noticing so much the particular cars on the streets or the faces of men walking by her. The pill made her whoozy and confused when she took it at bedtime, but if she tried to wander around, Grant kept her lying down and talking. If she told him anything revealing in those moments before sleeping, he never said. Then she stopped needing them. She couldn’t remember her dreams, but she still instinctively felt her throat when she woke up to make sure Gnash hadn’t squeezed his hands around it or tried to cut the taut cords binding her breath while she slept.

Margaret worked in the garden or took walks when she wasn’t working as a cocktail waitress. She didn’t choose to see any old friends. Once Jean arranged to drive her in and stopped for a drink during happy hour as Margaret started her shift. The manager spoke with Margaret behind the counter; he was just a pudgy man with a beard and glasses. She banked her checks and handed her mother the room and board in fives and ones from tips. She wouldn’t answer questions like how long she would be there or when she was going to go out a little.

“Maybe she’s just figuring things out,” Grant said.

“That’s what you always say. It might be some new drug. And what about college?” He always believed that this time she would get it right; Jean thought he was continually duped.

“If college isn’t right for her, she can do something else. If she wants to turn around now, even better.”

“Would you say that about anyone or just your daughter?”

“What’s over is over, and the best thing is to live well.” He gave her what might have been an ambiguous wink, and she didn’t ask anything more.



After she had been working for six weeks, Margaret invited her mother out for a special dinner, just the two of them. Jean wore a long black crepe dress with glitter flowers splashed over and a tightly buttoned Chinese collar. She draped a pearl shawl over her shoulders. Her dark hair glittered with her dress, the graceful silver strands woven throughout. Margaret wore a backless black dress and stockings with a silver diamond pattern. The tie at the back of her neck bobbed beneath her swept up blonde hair, and a black and violet tattooed butterfly flew up from low on her spine. Jean ordered a gin and tonic and a steak, while Margaret had iced tea and red snapper.

“Have you been looking for another job?” her mother asked. She looked over Margaret’s shoulder and watched the short wiry bartender with glasses and a red bow tie pouring shots.

“Not right now. The bar is an interesting place—you see a lot. You watch people.” Jean looked back to see Margaret observing her.

“You can see them anywhere,” Jean said, unfolding her napkin over her lap.

“Sure, but they talk about themselves in the bar. I like to listen.”

“Why? It must be depressing.”

“For pity’s sake. Why does everybody say pity is so bad? What makes them so angry when they say, ‘Don’t pity me. I don’t want anyone’s pity.’ I’ve said it myself—God, I’ve said it to you. But I think pity is precious—if you will take it for yourself, only then you can give it to somebody else. Few people accept it gracefully when it comes to them; most push it away.” She stirred her ice cubes, and they tinkled like wind chimes.

“It’s a good thing just to get through things sometimes,” Margaret added. Jean wondered at the flow of words, more than her daughter had strung together in weeks. She wanted to just listen and purse her lips so that no sigh or hiss of breath would stop the stream. She’d learned long ago driving carpool for Margaret and her peers that you could find out anything about teenagers by just shutting up and listening.

“I admire some of these people who keep on going, drinking a lot maybe, but still hoping,” Margaret said. She put one elbow on the table and propped her chin, watching the revolving door circling in the restaurant entryway. Jean saw a couple come in, a young blonde woman in high heels and a slate crepe dress on the arm of a silver-haired man in a tuxedo with a black silk scarf dangling from his neck.

“They wouldn’t be there if they had made the right choices. There are hard ways and easy ways to do things, like we always told you.” Jean knew she’d slipped, and she shivered under her hypocrisy.

“Or there are just ways, different for everyone. And things happen along those ways. The worst things that happen aren’t really connected to anything you did, and they might come after you get away with lots of stuff. As if there was some hidden pity for you all along. It’s in no way even, really. I don’t think it is like you always said,” Margaret smiled. She tapped the rim of her glass. “But it doesn’t matter. I want to tell you what happened before I came home.” Jean sighed.

“Don’t worry!” Margaret laughed. “You’re afraid I’m going to tell you all these things you didn’t find out or guess about, piled up for years. See, you don’t want to know as much as you think you do.” Her azure eyes were wide open and circled the room, smiling as if she were in another place having a second conversation at the same time. Her frank manner, so different from her usual cynicism, gave Jean those same stomach jitters, her physical reaction to uncertainty. She felt exactly as she had those nights she waited up an hour, two, four, lying on the living room couch watching romantic comedies and taking antacids, waiting for Margaret to return and picturing her mangled car and drowned body being dragged from the reservoir.

“And it’s not about my old boyfriend; screw him. I want to tell you about something that happened to June, my roommate last year. You met her.”

“Before you moved in with Gary .”

“You know she died.”

“No.” Jean started. She pictured an accident with Margaret in the car, maybe with Margaret driving, Margaret under the influence even, lawsuits, the homeowners’ umbrella coverage. Images cycled of needles, bad drug deals, random shootings in wrong neighborhoods. “What happened?”

“I’m telling you. After I moved out, June’s boyfriend moved in, and then he moved out—she should have left him first or never let him in, but she didn’t know better, like I didn’t. Anyway, she took a bottle of Tylenol and a fifth of bourbon thinking she wanted to kill herself. She had no idea how much she didn’t want to die, until just a little later. I found her, but too many hours went by—about twenty, we guessed; the earth had almost made a full somersault. She was trying to sleep it off and thought she was getting better.

“I stared at the tube with all the green and gray stuff that swirled out of her stomach, wondering if it would suck all her blood and spirit out with it. Her liver was about gone. I waited with her those last two days with just a night wedged between.

“When we knew there was no help for it, we just wanted to leave, to pick up, go, drive to the ocean, 300 miles away. I would have carried her to the seashore. She was vomiting constantly; the water was leaking out of her body; she was washing away. We would have rinsed our salt tears in sea water, sunk our feet deep in the ooze of sand and seaweed and let the water wash up over our ankles, our knees, our hips, past our breasts, to our necks and chins. Maybe she would have just walked out to the end to merge herself back in the water. But her parents wouldn’t agree, and the staff wouldn’t be responsible. She was already a corpse, but they wouldn’t let her go. I nearly got kicked out with my screaming, but June made me back down.

“In the end, she lived completely, a complete life--she was alive right there in a bed. I opened this window overlooking another building and let the cold wind in. The rain flung drops against the window, strewing them over the ledge and the floor like cold blue petals. June stretched her fingers out to the sill to wet them, bringing the drops straight to her lips and licking them, kissing them in. When the rain stopped, the sun gathered the clouds back in, and we sat listening to all the birds that we couldn’t see. We heard car doors opening and slamming shut, couples arguing, sirens wailing, guys whistling, grocery carts wobbling, and skateboards slapping the sidewalk—kachunk, kachunk, kachunk.

“That first night we pulled everything forward from deep in our memories, the very best things we could recover in our lives, both hers and mine. I wrote them all down, and we sweated over not forgetting anything, anything important and even small things--all sweet memories, sunny, dazzling but no longer hurting our eyes, especially from when we were kids. She told me about fishing for crawdads in the creek and bringing tadpoles home to raise up in an aquarium into horny green frogs and then letting them jump away. She told about skinny dipping in the reservoir with her girlfriends and eating wild raspberries off tangled prickly vines and scoring her hands with red scratches and berry juice. I told her about gathering sand dollars from the ocean, grainy dead creatures stretched out five ways to the world with little wound-like pores that once flushed the water in and out, and about walking out to my chest in the still warm waves with the sun burning my shoulders red. I remembered the sun setting on the beach and the campfires and carrying home the fiery smell in my hair which smoldered over me all night.

“June couldn’t talk so much by then, her tongue was sticking and flapping inside her dried-out mouth. I told her about when Carrie was born. I had braces then and bushy eyebrows and thick glasses and not one friend, but suddenly I held Carrie who looked at me, blinking and wondering and bright, and she belonged then to me too, just as much as to you. I touched her wrinkled fingers and she blinked back unsmiling, demanding in her silence: Would I be there for her? Would everything always be right? I was stifling my answer, not wanting to take away her hope; but how could it be? It broke my heart, even then, and, believe me, I knew nothing compared to what I know now.

“I will always keep the dog-eared blue spiral notebook I bought from the gift shop. I wrote everything June told me and also what I said. It was late when we slept. I was sitting up in a hard chair with my head on a pillow leaning against the window frame.

“The next morning we started in on tougher things. June’s face was yellow like the sun was taking over her as the waves in her ebbed, and her blonde hair was dark from the sweat and stuck to her skin and the pillow. But she had some energy for our work, and she didn’t want to leave anything out. I ate most of her breakfast, the oatmeal and applesauce, but she had a corner of toast and a little black tea. So she talked about her rape, and I talked about my accident and rehab. She talked about Joel who cheated on her and talked her down all over school, but she said what was beautiful about him, the way he would hold her chin as he looked in her eyes and how he took care of his mother when she had chemo. And I told her about Gary who followed me, but how he had taught me the names of birds, starlings and swallows and sparrows, as they gabbled at us from the trees on the boulevard.

“She talked about her fights with her parents and how they didn’t know where she was for weeks and then they only spoke in short words like dropped ice-cubes. They let her die the way she wanted. They sat outside her room and just visited during meals. She asked for a Philly cheesesteak and curly fries which she just licked and I ate. We stopped talking, and I wrote things down for myself so that I wouldn’t forget them later just because I was too busy with boyfriends or partying.

“`But who’s it for?’ she asked me, so weakly. `If I won’t be here; who’s this for? I know it’s for you, or for my parents to finally understand me, or for my friends. But what good is it, even if it’s for the whole world, if it’s not for me too?’

“`It’s always yours,’ I said to her. `You are for you and this is for you. You help me. I can catch onto the same ribbon you’re holding onto as you go up; I’ll follow you up. Just don’t let go of the end you’re grabbing onto right now.’

“`Yes,’ she promised. She let the priest in to bless her, and I stepped out and pushed my head into a corner and wept with sighs instead of tears.

“I held her hand as the sun went down and we shared the quiet between us like we would have a beer or a joint on other days. June’s mother came in and leaned her head against her daughter’s shoulder. The others came around her bed and they were all silent and the stars withdrew behind the clouds. No one turned the lights on except the nurses when they needed to check on something, and they turned the lights off when they left.

“It was after June died that I decided to leave. I wanted to wait for the semester to end, but I couldn’t have saved my grades by then, and Gary just made it easy—I had changed my mind about everything.”



Bill’s vanishing from the theater of her daily preoccupations paralleled Gnash’s absence at night. Her former lover’s voice never blurted over the phone wires anymore; he didn’t show up on her errands; and his car seemed to no longer be in the neighborhood. His absence troubled her nearly as much as his earlier presence, and with Gnash in retreat, she thought to turn the tables and find Bill for herself. She wasn’t sure what she’d do once she met him again face to face. She could scold him for being a homebreaker, but it wasn’t true, as the invitation had been hers. She might try to understand what she had found attractive, but she was sure it wasn’t his physical features or that particular talent some men have for talking a woman out of her clothes. She was curious whether he was married now or still single. She would just ask him to please let go.

She looked in the phone book for Bill or William Marshall, and there were five scattered around the county. The first number was disconnected; at the second, an elderly woman answered; the third and fourth had answering machines with unfamiliar tinny voices; the fifth rang without answer. The other option would take time and subterfuge. How could she explain daily visits to bars in strange towns to Grant? She decided the best course would be to visit during the late afternoon happy hours, while Carrie was at soccer practice. She chose the town of the fifth Bill Marshall, a quarter hour from the house.

It was a Friday afternoon, and she was on her fifth glass of Chardonnay and fifth bar in as many days. It was none other than Bill behind the counter, she was nearly sure--an older, comical Bill, almost bald, a little shrunken from before and with a stutter she didn’t remember. As he didn’t let on, neither did she.

“How long have you owned this place?” Jean asked. Her hair was whisked up in a clip, and her suburban social graces were slipped on like a pair of gloves. The only light came from the red and gold glow of the stained glass triangles in the lampshades.

“I j-just work here. Another?”

“No, thanks. I need to get home.”



The next morning Jean traced the veins in her hands, pumping blood like sap, running under her skin like the strong shallow roots of huge trees. She looked behind her to read the blue veins along the backs of her legs from carrying her children. She traced her laugh lines from the corners of her eyes to the ends of her face where the hair spurts out. She was still there and unscathed for some reason, and she had her own list of good and bad things, and it was all fine.

A few weeks later Jean had another dream of Gnash. He drew himself up with his arms in the air, and she pushed him over with a single finger to his chest. He arced back and swirled down into a deep gulley like a curled feather. She woke briefly and went back to sleep.



Another Saturday morning they had another game. Jean slept more these days, and Grant had to wake her. He kissed her eyelids, her breasts which wrinkled up as she lay flat, her knees which were bent toward him and finally her dry lips. She reached her arms around his neck and opened her eyes to see the sunlight fall through the window.

“Got to get going for the game today. Who’s taking first shower?” Grant asked.

“There’s enough time,” she said, pulling him back down.

2005


a story of an incident about a "incubus sighting"